W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #liznielsen, #invisibleevent, #radiance, #spookyaction, #shehangsthemoon 

If you have ever printed a black and white photograph, you have witnessed that “abracadabra” moment when a plain sheet of paper astonishingly fills with an image.  Uncanny.  I imagine that if you slowed down that mysterious action, you could see each of the photo-sensitized molecules darken in proportion to the amount of absorbed light to which it had been exposed.  It’s science and art.  It is unforgettable, your sense of something so strange taking place, seen yet unseen.

There is a recycling of ideas and technologies with a striking tribe of contemporary abstract artists embracing the very basics of photography. Include in this group of “process driven” artists: Marco Breuer, Matthew Brandt, Chris Bucklow, Ellen Carey, Susan Derges, Joan Fontcuberta, Christopher Giglio, Amanda Means, Ray Metzger, Susan Rankaitis, Meghan Riepenhoff, Gary Schneider and James Welling to name some. *1

Most of these artists use the essentials of light and chemistry on paper (or whatever is on hand), photogram, light drawing, and long exposures.  The basic act and art of “fixing the shadow” is the same.  The more it changes, the more it … well, you know.  

Scale has changed; paper sizes are larger.  Like abstract expressionist painting, print size can be daunting.  The amount of light instantly available through powerful strobes offers a new toy to play with.  Film speeds — if you’re using film — are faster.  Lenses are more refined both for looking out or for looking in.  Limits are constantly challenged.

But I am struck by a particular phenomenon in contemporary photography.  I have a term for it.  Hamlet, as his outrage quickens into resolve and action, alludes to the “invisible event.”*1  I like that, the suggestion of almost subversive activity, offstage, yet at the center of the creative act.  The aggregation of things seemingly unseen is seen.

Look at these works as evidence, photo-based works realized through the incremental aggregation of light through long exposure, often without a camera or any optical intercession.  The final image is the evidence of an unseen, never-to-be seen action, the “invisible event”.  It is like the visual report of a fourth dimension.  It is not literal.  What accumulates on the light-sensitized surface has a single, unique reality, but it is a fiction, an abstraction from light.  

Perhaps my use of evidence is no more than a massing or montaging of identities.  

Historically this work seems closest to that of Jules-Étienne Marey whose long exposures of movement produced a single image, depicting a pole vaulter placing the pole, sailing in an arc over the bar, then landing, all in one.  Earlier there is Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s Paris Boulevard scene with a shoeshine man.  A figure passes in and out of the frame and gives us the spectral evidence of his presence (and absence). 

With Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton, the progenitors of stop-action photography, you have single frames of frozen moments.  I would offer that these are identities.  The horse does, indeed have all four feet off of the ground.  It is not any more complex than that.

It isn’t until the work of Gjon Mili that we have an almost 3-dimensional, hologram-like ghost of a figure descending the staircase.  It seems dense and magical.

Think of more recent David Malin’s space photographs, his constellations.  Even through the best telescope we cannot see what ultimately is revealed in the photograph.  Light arrives and collects over a period of time, the celestial nebulae gather shape and form, even color.  It is like that wonderfully corny moment in Star Wars or Space Trek when the booster rockets engage the thrusters to hit warp speed in hyper space; time stops as we change dimensions as super novas surround us.  

Look at this technically too.  The way in which an Abstract Expressionist builds up a canvas is analogous to the photographer building up an image.  The term “gesture” in painting may be comparable to the photographer’s subjective handling of the unpredictable variables, light and chemistry.  Technique and experience inform an artist’s instinct for exposure time, how to let the mystery happen before fixing the image.  The “invisible event” takes place offstage and the performance of evidence of its happening is the image.  

The attractive and strong presence in contemporary photo abstractions is remarkable, and the “invisible event” is the catalyzing force at the center of it.

All of this brings us to Liz Nielsen, who is a sculptor of light, working in two dimensions, basically.  Her super power is seeing through color, overlapping hues and tints like the lovechild of Helen Frankenthaler and Joseph Albers.  The work is all abstract although you’re welcome to see cities and plants and whatever your imagination conjures.  The work exudes confidence.  It doesn’t dither; it’s intentional.  Of course it’s full of light — luminous — but it is also light in spirit. 

Photography is an attempt to capture light.  Early civilizations left sculptural configurations of stone to frame light during solstices.  These can be simple apertures that allow and direct beams of light, or they can be more complicated, specific shapes, like a sword.  This was, apparently, meaningful.  Stonehenge is the example that comes easily to mind even if we don’t fully understand it.  Like fire, humans are drawn to the light and want to manage it.   

Liz Nielsen conjures with light and color, creating spectral compositions of visible light and fixing that on paper — usually.  Think of crystals hung in the window of a baby’s room with light playing through and refracting colors on to the sill and walls.  Some of the artist’s work on view here is anchored to the wall conventionally, and some of it hangs above, seemingly lighter than air.  Nielsen works in all sorts of different shapes and sizes; sometimes the work is purely abstract, or sometimes more representational, as it is here with mountains.  

She made a site specific triptych “Spooky Action” for an exhibition, in a deconsecrated country church in upstate New York.  “Sky River," 2021 (left) and “Sky Village," 2021 are the flanking works.  They are noticeably cooler in tone than the central “Moonlit Lake”, whiter, not yellow.  The blue is intense.  One thinks of Matisse’s cutouts, but these are landscape and not close up still life.  There isn’t white negative space; the backgrounds are dark. For the middle panel, ”Moonlit Lake," 2019, in the center on the wall above and behind the altar, she used FujiClear Crystal Archive Display Material; it’s like a large piece of clear film, hung off the wall, with a color positive rather than negative image that light and color pass through projecting on to the wall.  She took something massive and almost timeless — mountains — and  rendered that as almost ephemeral, as colored light.  It is an enlightened search for the sublime.  

Divine.  

Remember we were in a former church.  

Most of the works were big, and they reference stained glass in its translucency or transparency.   We don’t witness a luminous but static design as we would if we were looking at the Rose Window at Notre Dame.  This is three dimensional.  The center piece lets light refract through it to play on the wall.  Looking at it takes some work; we have to change position and see outside the frame.

Further a certain amount of ambient light bounces on the surface of the works, reflecting the grids of windows in the room. 

The verticality gives the work heft and loft adding to its transcendence.  All of this is intended.   We are meant to slow down and invest ourselves in looking and seeing.  This feels unfamiliar.  The experience is meditative although there are few guideposts to lead our journey.

Look.  Stop.  Consider.  Look more and longer. 

The artist is not daunted by size.  She is prepared to take on the galaxy, specifically with a series of moons,. These are white or lightly pastel  orbs ringed with kisses of color, perfect abstractions of the universe.  The works play like negatives/positives, shifting back and forth, offering some sort of undecipherable communication from the beyond.

There is a kind of contemporary photo-based work describe as “the invisible event”.

With size, color, imagination and nerve, Nielsen hangs the moon.

*1 Hamlet Act IV, Scene iv

*2 “The Representation of Abstraction/The Abstraction of Representation” Andy Grundberg, “Crisis of the Real, Writings on Photography, 1974-1989”), Aperture Foundation Inc., 1990), page 165

Parts of this essay were included in “The Invisible Event”, written for Joan Fontcuberta’s magazine. 2005.© 2005 and for a catalogue essay commissioned for “Liz Nielsen, Spooky Action”, Art Austerlitz, Austerlitz, NY, June 2021 ©2021

©2021

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